mdsimpson92 wrote:Because that's a bit dangerous, those ideas will suck you in.......I will now go back to the corner for that pun.
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In terms of criterion, while I won't mind that these things are absolutely air tight, I do think that they can be helpful in terms of usefulness as a concept and elegance. I do mention that panprotopsychism is not at all incompatible with physicalism, just not the more reductive versions. I also heard that it could match with a weak type of emergence. But yeah, while I think that something is indeed mysterious, I don't think we should just stop and slap on the label "the mysterious" to it and call it a day.
I don't think you can escape some sort of emergence since we have to account for why rocks and trees seem unconscious compared to dogs and people. Now where the physicalist and panprotopsychist agree is that "stuff" for lack of a better term - we can call it matter, energy, space and time - has "what it takes" - the raw capacity to become human or dog level conscious given the right circumstances.
The difference is how far down the stack of supervenience you want to push consciousness or qualia or at least something more like them than unlike them. And it seems to me the further you push down consciousness and qualia in a more fully formed state, the more it looks like a "little men in the radio" style argument - say, as an analogy, you can't explain how a radio works, yet you're sophisticated enough to know there aren't little men in it, but you somehow feel that the radio is so complex and inexplicable that there must be at least something "little-man-like" at even the lowest levels of the substance that constitutes the radio.
Know what I mean? The panprotopsychist or panexperientialist answer gives you the illusion of being an answer because the real problem is deferred intact. So I don't understand why people treat the hard problem as insoluble off the bat, instead of acknowledging that there's a hard problem, that our knowledge has limits, and let's roll up our sleeves and get cracking. (I think Daniel Dennett's solution of merely refusing to acknowledge the hard problem is also a dodge but in a different direction)